The digital state

• Fathima Thamanna, 15, walks into the room with her newest friend, an entity made up of cardboard boxes, silver foil, paper cutouts, and a pair of long black leather gloves. It was doing its best to imitate the human form.  These sundry materials only made up its façade, however. What elevated it from being a mundane exhibit was an invisible circuit of electrical wires within.

Fathima places it on a table for her classmates to see and presses a switch on the side. The box raises its right arm like a soldier in drill. On command, it shakes the hand of anyone who approaches. Fathima, who programmed the polite robot, is all smiles.

We are in the IT lab of her school in Kozhikode, a bustling urban center on India’s Malabar Coast, which stretches to over 500 km of the Arabian Sea's shoreline. It is the largest city in northern Kerala, India's southernmost state.

Fathima's project began just a few months ago, just after the summer holidays, and was inspired by a strange visitor. Upon entering the school gates, Fathima and her classmates were greeted by a two-metre tall robot dressed in a white cloak that roamed the grounds. It looked like a priest with a touch screen for a face. Soon after, the robot's visit was covered on the school's YouTube channel, presented by an AI-generated newsreader. Everyday digital life at Fathima Thamanna's school. And a small miracle.

Fathima wasn’t the only student who went back home with her head buzzing with ideas this day. The government-aided higher secondary school, or Calicut girls’ HSS, caters for girls alone, and each one of its students comes from a Muslim family from nearby areas. At morning assembly, all 260 of them converge on the school grounds in ironed uniforms and neatly tied hijabs, ready to sing the national anthem at the top of their voice.

Keeping them engaged in school life is not only an administrative task for the school management but also a social mission. At 204 million, India has the world’s third-largest Muslim population. In spite of making up its biggest minority, however, the Indian Muslim population faces sizable barriers to social progress and economic mobility, even though the gaps between the Muslim and national average on most human development metrics are narrowing. A wide range of studies points to religion-based discrimination in access to education, employment, and public services such as piped water, closed drainage, schools, and clinics.

In the Muslim areas of Kozhikode, girls didn’t always complete school education. „We are in the seashore area. It is anyway backward when it comes to education. Girls from the community were especially deprived of schooling,“ said Femi, a teacher at Calicut Girls' HSS who goes by one name. Most girls attending the school belong to families whose income is tied to fishing along the coast. „Some are middle-class, but most come from a very weak section of society.“

The school has another distinction, too. The girls receive completely digitized education, from classroom infrastructure to the teaching curriculum.

Fathima joined the school only two years ago at her mother's insistence. She said the homemaker had heard about it from other parents in her community. „Everyone knows about this school,“ the 9th-class student added. Her mother wanted her to enrol because she was told „it is famous for exposing the students to technology.“

Fathima felt „confused and afraid“ when she first changed schools, she says. „There was no laptop or computer in my old school. No screen anywhere. Here, the teachers were using multimedia projectors in every class.“

Kerala's special path

Fathima looks forward to visiting the IT lab where she usually finds every other girl playing with new technologies, whether making a video game or a GPS tracking detecting system for a small boat. Femi explained to me that the motivation for the latter stemmed from a tragic event that impacted the coastal community many of them belong to. In 2023, a boat overturned off Tanur beach near Kozhikode, resulting in 22 fatalities. This incident highlighted the dangers small boats face at sea, a relevant concern given that local fishermen use similar boats daily. Many of the girls believe their new IT skills equip them to offer solutions for the problems faced by their parents and neighbours. „I am very proud to be here,“ Fathima said, rearranging the electric circuit that animates her robot.

Growing prosperity and the desire for upward mobility are driving up enrolment rates across the country. At the same time, the Indian education system is struggling with massive quality deficits (see box, „The Indian Education System“). The state of Kerala has been going its own way for decades. The Indian model state has achieved an unprecedented digitalisation of its education system, which has gained international recognition (see box „Digitalisation of Schools“) and increased the chances of getting one of the few coveted university places and skilled jobs for which millions and millions of school leavers are competing.

In Kerala, though, things have been different. For several decades now, the state has followed its own governance model. In 1956, when Kerala was carved out as a state, it was among India’s poorest. By the 1980s, however, its residents were reported to have a standard a life comparable to that of developed nations'. Since then, academics of various disciplines worldwide have tried to code what became known as The Kerala Model of Development. In 2001, the education department kicked off a programme called IT@School. Two years later, it was implemented in all schools in Kerala. One of its cornerstones was to train existing teachers for the digital transformation instead of bringing in specialized trainers to overhaul the system. The department picked from the statewide pool a group of teachers to train the rest. They were called master trainers.

Math teacher Priya TM was Kozhikode’s first master trainer. Over a pot of filtered coffee, Priya recalled the early days of IT@School. „The goal was that by 2020, all subjects be taught using IT.“ But that was easier said than done, she says, sitting in a slick café on the city’s sprawling beachfront. Across the promenade, young couples sat on the rocks while holding wide umbrellas over their heads to keep off the muggy heat. Inside the air-conditioned café, visitors worked on their laptops while sipping flat whites.  „The biggest hindrance was the teachers’ lack of awareness, and in some cases, active hesitation towards computers. Those close to retirement were especially reluctant,“ Priya TM says. „Some of them had never used computers before. If the screen had a command saying, 'press any key to continue', they would ask us 'where is any key’ on the keyboard?“ The equipment was also limited back then: „Two teachers would one use one computer. Same mouse, same keyboard. One would press the up button, the other would be pressing the down button.“

Over the following years, as the program expanded, the department sent more equipment to the schools, including multimedia projectors, Bluetooth speakers, and laptops. By 2012, IT had been added to the school curriculum. 

However, this did not change the national trend: enrolment in government schools steadily fell, as parents opted for private schools hoping for brighter career prospects.

In 2016, contesting a re-election in the state polls, Kerala’s Left Democratic Front, which is led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), spoke about the need for second-generation reforms. Its vision of a Nava Keralam (New Kerala) centred on reinstating public faith in state education. It would do so by completing the digitisation of government schools and bringing them up to world standards. In a rare political turn – Kerala’s voters seldom vote the reigning party back to power – the LDF won the polls.

The next year, it promoted the initiative IT@School to a government-owned company and thus gained greater financial flexibility. The new company was called KITE and Anvar Sadath, who headed IT@School from 2007 to 2012, returned to take charge of KITE. His key mandate was to extend IT-enabled infrastructure to each of Kerala’s 16030 government-owned-and-aided schools, covering 4.5 million students. „By January 2018, the project was completed. Each classroom had a laptop, a mounted projector and access to multimedia content,“ says Sadath.

None of it would function without an  internet connection. That’s why a new IT policy unveiled in 2017 recognizes access to the internet as a basic right. Kerala was the first state in India to enact such a law. The government-sponsored fibre initiative aims to bring high-speed internet to all schools in Kerala. So far, this has been achieved in a third of the schools.

No false modesty

When Covid lockdowns shut down the state, KITE launched a YouTube Channel, to broadcast daily classes recorded by selected teachers to students’ homes. More than four million students joined the virtual classes, but about a hundred thousand were left out. In a rural hamlet near Kozhikode, a girl in the 9th grade whose family did not have a digital device, ended her life in frustration. After that, the state identified two hundred thousand students in households that lay off the grid as a countermeasure. They were given free laptops to take home with them.

Each laptop delivered by KITE, whether to a school or house, is integrated with open-source software adapted to the needs of the teachers and the students, from unique fonts for Malayalam computing to an Operating System compatible with low-grade computers. „By 2021, the state of Kerala saved 30 billion Rupies by using free and open-source software,“ says Sadath, not without pride - after all, that's the equivalent of 335 million Euros in savings. 

The results have started to roll in. More and more parents in Kerala are withdrawing their children from private schools. Meanwhile, enrolment in government schools is on the rise: From 2017 to 2022, nearly one million girls and boys were re-enrolled.

And Schoolchildren are not the only beneficiaries of the programme: Over the past few years, the especially talented students who were accepted into the „Little Kites program“ have trained 400,000 mothers in cyber safety and fake news detection.

Ayesha Amna, a 10th-grade student at Calicut Girls’ HSS, plays a video that shows a piece of fake news that went viral in 2019. „Two people are shown assembling eggs from plastic that look real, with the yoke and everything,“ she explains, moving to the next slide on her laptop. The voiceover accompanying this video claimed these eggs were made in China to fool buyers in India. It advised viewers to buy eggs only from sellers they knew and trusted. As more and more people shunned the eggs sold in the markets, India’s food safety and standards authority released a statement debunking the damning misinformation. Using reverse image search, Amna showed her parents and their neighbors that this video emerged on the internet in 2017. It was an internet prank, she told them. „Not real news.“

Urban-rural divide

But few things remain the same across India's gaping urban-rural divide. Ground realities can radically shift from the beginning to the end of a short car drive. Some 150 km away from Kozhikode, in a school lying at the bottom of a hill, there exists a separate room to stock laptops that no one knows what to do with. The High School Neeravaram is one of 301 government schools in Wayanad. From the western end of Kozhikode, a winding road goes up in a sharp ascent towards a landscape defined by undulating hills and thick forests. After every hairpin bend, people get out of their cars to take pictures of the sprawling views before they are chased back inside by gangs of monkeys guarding their turf. Wayanad’s colder climate makes it a coveted spot for commercial plantations; low canopies of tea, coffee, and pepper alternate with towering clumps of jackfruit and areca nut. There is no shortage of wildlife, either; the locals are used to running into elephants, deer and hares while navigating the woods.

At the high school in Neeravaram, digitisation is still in its infancy. The laptops are lined up in neat rows on a marble shelf in a room opposite the empty courtyard, as if waiting for an inspection. Last year, pupils who did not have tablets or computers were able to take them home. They brought them back and now they are gathering dust.

The majority of Wayanad’s population is made up of indigenous groups with a fraught history of bonded labor on agricultural estates. More than four decades after the state abolished the regressive practice, people belonging to aboriginal tribes count as Kerala’s poorest residents. Today, most of them work as wage labourers either on commercial plantations or construction projects. The men earn seven Euros for a day’s work; and the women four.

School dropouts are high among children from indigenous communities. „They don’t want to come to school,“ the principal said with a frown. Going to school in parts of Wayanad, where villages lie high up on the hills or deep into the forests, is not a child's play. A senior teacher at the school volunteers to take us to a rural settlement from where some of the children journey to the school.

Nanjaramula, a settlement of 15 homes, is five km from the main road. It’s a treacherous drive through a rocky path cut through a dense plantation of jackfruit and areca nut, with mango trees planted like signposts. Across Kerala, up to 90,902 students are concentrated in remote areas inhabited by indigenous groups. In Wayanad, where the government runs a school for every four or five villages, its education department sends out a vehicle to bring the children to classes.

Back to the cell phone

Namita owns a one-storey concrete house with a sloping, shingled roof on top of a small hill. The outer walls are painted fluorescent yellow, so that one can easily spot it against the tall green trees circling it. She hosts us on the cemented platform outside that is reserved for visitors. Like everyone else in this village, Namita and her family belong to the Paniya tribe, which makes up 70 percent of Wayanad's indigenous population. The Paniyas take pride in their old traditions, but their lifestyles have changed. Today, their houses are made not from mud and bamboo but from concrete and stone. The women have switched from beaded necklaces to gold chains. The community still elects a headman, but his role is nominal at best.

Education is the biggest game-changer for the tribe. More children attend regular classes, and finishing high school is no longer a rare honour. The boys don't want to end up picking tea and shelling pepper. Some of the women want to work in government offices  – even though they have heard the pay could be better. Namita is one of them, she herself has been taking several entrance exams to the statewide clerical service. Every year, she reaches slightly closer to the qualifying list. Tribal groups have reserved jobs in state governments, but the competition is stiff.

Unemployment among the educated, especially women, is one of four unresolved challenges for Kerala’s development model, noted the renowned economist KP Kannan in his 2022 paper that assessed the state’s record from 1960 to 2020.

In 2023, in the central district of Ernakulum, hundreds of young jobseekers including college graduates and engineering majors showed up for a test of physical ability to qualify for the job of a peon, or office assistant, at a government office. Even though the post called for education up to only 7th grade and offered a meagre salary of 256 Euros per month, young men assembled in an open ground armed with their bikes to compete in a cycling contest. Only 101 were recruited. Women and disabled jobseekers weren’t allowed to take the test.

For seven years, Namita has paid annually for an online course that trains students for the entrance exam. It's one of the first things she did after buying a mobile phone. „Having mobile phones means people can fill up the form for a competitive exam on their own, which is something for which they had to travel to the nearest city center earlier,“ Balan Kolamakolli, Wayanad's KITE coordinator, explained.

But devices alone cannot make a difference: When the children got free laptops to take home, many were initially excited, Balan recalles, but after some time, most gravitated back to their parents' handsets. Some of the families did not know where to place the laptops or how to care for them. Sixty percent of them were damaged within a year. The schools took them back and stowed them in the spare room. Unlike in the cities, where smart classrooms are making a big difference, schoolchildren in village schools mostly rely on mobile phones to pick up new information and finish their homework.

Namita hopes her two daughters perform well in their exams. The older one, who is in 12th grade, wants to teach at a school like hers. The younger one wants to be an archaeologist. She got the idea after watching a Malayalam film in which the female character played one. After coming home from the theatre, she borrowed her mother’s mobile phone to search YouTube for how to become an archaeologist.

Their mother will keep trying to land the government job. Her friends keep teasing her about her many attempts over the years. They also caution her about the hefty sum of 78 Euros she pays yearly to get the video tutorials. She won't be deterred, though. This year, her name appeared in what is called the supplementary list, a backup of candidates with lower ranks who will be summoned should a chosen candidate turn down the offer. „I could get a call—who knows!“ She checks her phone screen just in case there was a notification. ---

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